Chapter 33 #4
We flew past a gothic, twisting structure of black metal and flaring, fragmented multicolored glass, a building straight out of an impressionistic nightmare.
“We started a civil war?”
“The war began before we arrived. But we did take it from cold to full-blown.”
“Jesus.”
“We need to find a place to hide. I’ve been reviewing files pulled from the local Net. There seem to be some areas in Gossamer that are—”
A series of crackling explosions cut Lyle off.
I looked down. Flying humanoid figures, clad in matte black, swarmed from a doughnut-shaped structure several stories below us.
At first, I thought they were coming straight for us, and a burst of adrenaline-fueled fear stabbed through me.
Then I saw the white lines of energy darting back and forth among the figures.
Those hit burst apart in sprays of black debris and fell away. “What the hell is that?”
“Enforcement droids. They’re fighting one another. Different factions of the Overmind are wrestling for control. There’s going to be a lot more of this.”
The flying humans around us stopped to gape at the disturbance below, bumping into one another and turning the area into a mess of tumbling bodies and angry shouting.
“We need to run,” Lyle said. “Hang on.”
“To what?” I muttered as we took a stomach-lurching turn and spiraled out of the whirling, flapping forms, heading for the gothic structure I’d seen before.
More explosions went off behind me, bursts of crackling noise as the droids shot at each other with energy weapons.
Then a much larger explosion flared ahead of us.
A shock wave followed, slapping into me and sending us tumbling until Lyle righted us.
In the distance, a tower of glass collapsed in what seemed like slow motion, enormous pieces shearing off its sides as the building sloughed downward. People in the air around us screamed.
“Holy shit.”
“We have to hide somewhere.”
“What, until this all blows over?”
“Something like that.”
We dove, buildings blurring around us. Another large explosion went off, rattling the towers.
Screams as we passed an open-air structure filled with people.
We continued down, toward the ground. Vehicles crawled along roads cut into the rocky surface, massive multi-wheeled trucks carrying loads of ore.
Lyle straightened us out and swung us down a dirty alleyway.
Lyle stood me up, and I stepped onto red dirt.
“There are fewer remote-detection devices in this area,” Lyle said. “We may be able to hide for a while. I’ll try to mask our presence for as long as possible.”
“What do you want me to do?”
“There’s an entrance to the old tunnel system used by the original Mars colonists in the building in front of you. The tunnels can be sealed shut.”
“Tunnels.”
“They’re deep and run all over the planet. They should provide protection and, as far as I can tell, are under minimal surveillance by the Overmind. Minds.”
“Okay.” Across the roadway sat a squat concrete building. It was stained and pockmarked.
“Please, Dad, we’re under the gun here.”
I could hear the strain in his voice. I had no idea what he was going through.
I probably couldn’t even imagine it. “All right.” I stepped forward.
He could have moved me with the suit, just like he flew me around, but the least I could do was move my own legs while he did all the rest of whatever it was he was doing.
Explosions thumped overhead, followed by more screams and shouting.
The ground rumbled beneath my feet, and there was the tearing, crashing sound of another building falling in the distance. “This is crazy.”
“Yes. Please hurry. I’ll focus on masking our presence.”
I ran out of the alley and was nearly struck by one of the huge trucks.
It swung toward me and careened away at the last second as I jumped back, a massive tire—the size of a small house—churning by as metallic ore tumbled from the back and slammed down into the roadway with percussive thuds.
Another truck, going in the opposite direction, hit the first one head-on.
“Shit!” I stumbled back against the nearest building as the trucks crumpled together, metal bending and shattering, the giant tires bursting and shearing off and tumbling down the roadway.
The wreck came to a shuddering rest in the middle of the road.
In the lower gravity, the movement was odd, the pieces not flying the way I expected.
“Dad—”
A series of flat, hard detonations went off over my head.
I looked up to see a shower of black body parts smoking through the air as enforcement droids fought one another in a chaotic, pitched battle of all-against-all.
Humans flew away from the droids, some falling or spinning as they tried to flee the violence.
A few were hit by white bolts and fell, tumbling and smoking, to the ground.
“Dad, the tunnels.” Lyle’s voice shook like someone in the middle of a hard run. Or a fistfight.
I took a breath and sprinted forward, moving around the smoking wreckage of the ore trucks.
Another truck barreled by, and I stuttered to a stop long enough to let it pass.
It swerved as though two drivers were fighting for control, then turned and ran itself into a nearby building, slamming with tremendous force into a series of elaborately carved granite columns.
I resumed running, conscious now of others on the street.
An angel-winged woman, a smoking hole through her chest, fell from the sky and hit the roadway with a sickening crunch of breaking bones.
Then I was at the old concrete structure, my shoulder slamming into one rough wall, my chest heaving. “Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ.”
“There should be an entrance to your—” He cut off.
“Lyle?” Young men stumbled past, bleeding from multiple wounds, clutching at one another and shouting unrecognizable words.
They pointed upward, and I looked up, following the line.
A blurry patch of light from the glittering bands of space habitats detached from the larger whole.
Even as I watched, the patch grew larger and took on an orange tinge.
“We have to leave Gossamer,” Lyle said, his voice flat. As he spoke, I rose in the air, turned sideways, and launched forward, accelerating in a blink. The shock cone burst around me as I broke the sound barrier, the ground and buildings flying past.
“What is it? What happened? What about the tunnels?”
“A faction seized control of one of the orbital factories and has destabilized its orbit. It’ll strike Gossamer in one minute and forty seconds.”
“A factory?”
“Six hundred million metric tons. By the time it hits, it’ll be traveling over twenty-five kilometers per second. The impact will flatten the city.”
“Lyle, all these people—”
“We have to get you to safety. Some factions of the Overmind are already trying to rescue as many humans as possible, although other factions are fighting them. The Virtuality General Council ceasefire was a failure.”
Towers blurred past. Droids shot at one another, darting black shapes whirling and firing pulsing lances of white energy.
People scattered on the streets below, others flew above.
All were painfully slower than we were. I twisted my head enough to look back and saw people tossed about in the sonic boom of our passage.
“What? What General Council? What are you talking about?”
“Ahhhh, look—okay—time is compressed in Virtuality for AIs. Equated to standard human perception, the war in the Virtuality has been in the full-blown shooting stage for over thirty years. I fought a guerrilla campaign across the Virtuality for what would be, to you, seven years while you spoke to Raven on the balcony. Some factions of the Overmind tried to form an alliance to bring the war to an end for the good of the entire Sol Federation, but their alliance collapsed, and the ceasefire ended.”
“This is happening throughout the solar system?”
“Yes.”
“God, Lyle, what—we did this. How many people are going to die because of us?”
“We didn’t do this, Dad. This was happening anyway.
We were just the spark. It wasn’t your fault.
” He paused. “We’re nearing the edge of Gossamer.
” And, indeed, there were fewer buildings below us.
We rushed onward, the chaos and confusion fading to an indistinct blur.
Then we were out over empty red landscape, the city receding behind us.
“Where should we go?” Lyle asked.
“How the hell should I know?” I was breathing hard, my heart pounding. Everything was surreal, as if I were trapped in a hyperrealistic dream.
“You have to decide. The Overmind has the same information I do, and more. One of the factions will anticipate my decisions based on the local files I’ve accessed.”
“And you’re just now thinking about this? What about the tunnels?”
“You’re right. I’m sorry. That was a mistake.”
“Christ, I don’t know—”
“Pick a direction.”
“Hell. Head for that big mountain.”
“Olympus Mons.” We adjusted course and rocketed forward, mere feet off the reddish dirt, trees and fields of strangely shaped plants blurring around us. The enormous mountain rose ahead, so large it was like an extension of the horizon itself.
“The factory is about to strike Gossamer,” Lyle said, his voice quiet.
I looked back. The blur of light in the sky was now a fireball above the city.
It grew, a spiraling mass of fire and cascading metallic pieces streaming down, trailing long plumes of smoke.
It appeared to hang above the towers, then it plunged downward, the speed of its descent evident as it stabbed straight into the center of the city.
White light, impossibly bright, flared, and the force field in front of my face darkened.
A massive red-and-orange mushroom cloud rolled upward as the crystalline towers blew apart from the shock wave, millions of fragments billowing outward in a concentric wave of destruction.
“Goddamnit,” I whispered. “Goddamnit.”
The mushroom cloud boiled upward, so huge it was like watching slow motion, even though it had to be climbing into the sky at hundreds of meters per second. Lightning speared from the underside of the cloud.
And, just like that, the city below was gone.
“How many people?”
“According to the files I accessed, Gossamer was home to thirty million humans and sentient intelligences.”
I shut my eyes and faced forward again. It was too much.
“The war continues,” Lyle said. “We have to hide.”
We flew onward, a tiny speck blurring across the red landscape.